I’m sure I’ve said this before, but here it is again: Backroads are often the best way to find uncommon beauty. Or maybe that should be common beauty, since it is all around us, but maybe taken for granted.
Is this a natural scar or a portal into another world? If a portal, would the other world be weirder than our’s today?
Until next time,
Ken
My wife and I began a tradition of spending a couple of weeks in Indiana in the fall a few years ago. There are multiple reasons why we established this tradition. 1. My wife has relatives in the area, having lived in Indianapolis during her early childhood. 2. A relative allows us to stay in their weekend cabin that is very near Brown County State Park, which is a very popular place in the fall. 3. We both enjoy seeing fall color in the hardwood forests in this part of the U.S. 4. I get to photograph the fall color and write about it in this blog.
Timing our visit to see the best of the fall color is always hit or miss. Sometimes we are too early, sometimes too late and sometimes we see the peak fall color.
Photographing in the same location at the same time of the year is a challenge and I often worry about my photographic images being too repetitive. After all, how many ways can one photograph trees, forests, barns and fall scenes? Lots, actually, but how many are unique? Trying to get unique and interesting images is a challenge. I can only hope that the scenery varies sufficiently, year by year that my images will not be too boring.
Driving the backroads of Indiana is a good way to appreciate the fall color and other rural fall country scenes.
The barn in this image sits far back from a roadway on private property. I shot it with a telephoto lens from the edge of the roadway, hand holding the camera. I shot from different perspectives trying to get shots with the least amount of that pile of debris in front of it in the image. However, this image may be the best overall, even with that unsightly mess in front of the barn.
I was a little late for the actual sunrise at this location in Brown County Park, so I walked down a slope into the briars, weeds, grasses and brushy growth, thinking a shot from within all that foreground clutter might at least be different than that of the early photographers that were wrapping up their sunrise shoot from the top of the slope and there was no way to avoid getting that messy foreground in a shot from anywhere here.
I had to spend a considerable amount of time picking the stick tights from my clothing after this mornings’ shoot.
Until next time,
Ken
Indiana has much farmland and forest land, which is best observed along the country backroads.
Driving the backroads can lead to unexpected discoveries in the many small country communities.
Like this old school house adjacent to a cemetery. The weather was changing with clouds gathering, making for great sky in some images. I wanted to be sure to have the bell visible in a photograph, so I had to find the best place from which to shoot to achieve that. It would have been good to have had a higher place upon which to stand. There was a stump of an old tree nearby. I tried standing on the stump, but I could still not get the bell in a photo from that vantage point, so I had to settle for shooting standing on the ground from farther away than I wanted to shoot.
A community church shared a parking lot with the school. There were interesting storm clouds above the church, so I had to shoot that.
Continuing along the backroads, I took a gravel road through a portion of the Hoosier National Forest, stopping to shoot along the roadway.
I had passed a local walking up this road and I greeted him as I pulled my camera gear from my vehicle. We chatted for a few minutes and he revealed that he had relatives in the metropolitan area where I live. It is not unusual to discover such facts from random meeting such as this, which shows just how small our world can be. He continued his walk up the hill and I picked several spots from which to get Indiana backroad fall photographs. The walker came back down the hill and back up again at least one more time as I shot nearby.
To be continued,
Ken
